Carnival of Testers #4

What a period the last three weeks have been in the testers blogosphere. Really interesting with a few noticeable themes - conference-related and "honesty" were the two biggest themes that I noticed this time around.

Below is a taster - and I'm trying not to burden the same people with traffic to their blogs the whole time ;-) As usual you can volunteer any post worthy of a shout in the comments for the period (25-Nov - 14-Dec09).

There were a bunch of post relating to EuroStar2009. You can check out the twittering with the #esconfs hashtag.

• It was whilst looking at these hashtags I noticed one of several posts that Nathalie (@FunTESTic) made.
• Shrini Kulkarni (@shrinik) gave a nice roundup of the conference.
• Michael Bolton (@michaelbolton) wrote about the test lab set-up. He also put up the slide show of his "burning issues" talk on his site. Well worth a look.
• Rikard Edgren gave a full smörgåsbord of flavours (or maybe it should be julbord for this time of year) from the event, here.

Exploratory Testing popped in a few guises in this round - two different slants were:

• Ray Claridge writes about Agile and now brought ET into the equation, here.
• Eric Jacobson provided his first experience of teaching ET and session based testing.

 Other posts covering a range of topics were:

• Albert Gareev was working through testing and checking questions in a questionin piece.
• Amit Kulkarni (@mumbaitesting) reflected on a "popular" question about testing something completely, here.
• Gojko Adzic (@gojkoadzic) made a nice film analogy about the dangers of releasing early.
• As someone wanting to do my own Pecha Kucha I was interested to read Markus Gärtner's (@mgaertne) post. Nice pics!
• utest (@utest) did an interview with Matt Heusser, part 2 is here.
• For those wondering if you're an unconsciously incompetent tester check out Anne-Marie Charrett's post here.
• Lists, lists, lists... Jay Phillips (@jayphilips) gave a list covering 100+ software testing blogs, here. You can check if your own is there!
• Elisabeth Hendrikson (@testobsessed) gave a reminder about keeping the deliverables of Agile in focus.
• Catherine Powell was insightful and to the point with a couple of posts on randomness and being thick skinned.
• Justin Hunter (@Hexawise) gave an example of a "subtle" defect that is has been seen by many without being corrected. Could you see it before it was pointed out? (Warning: it's to do with English grammar!)
• Naomi Karten (@NaomiKarten) gave a cautionary tale about managing expectations - although I think of it more as understanding expectations. Take a look, here.
• Trish Khoo gave some advice on delivering bad news - for testers and wanabee testers. 
• Lanette Creamer (@lanettecream) wrote a bunch of thoughtful articles, but this thought-provoking one stood out.
• There was a Gordon Ramsay theme to a couple of Rob Lambert's (@Rob_Lambert) posts! Firstly in a nice analogy about ingredients for a tester, here, and then another when I was expecting the expletives to fly here - although it ended up as perseverance applause ! Tongue-in-cheek but with a serious background on "fairness".
• This leads onto some other calls recently for niceness, honesty and fairness by a various people: Lisa Crispin (@lisacrispin), wrote a piece encouraging people to treat each other with respect and Matt Heusser (@mheusser) highlighted some "copied" work and rounds off the carnival with a piece on virtue.

Hope you find some interesting posts in the above - I lost count of the number of posts I read but had good fun doing so. More after the holidays...

Any gems that slipped under my radar?

Carnival of Testers #1

I got this idea from my company's internal blog site - where there's a weekly round-up of interesting internal posts. This is encouraged to be a rotating review - someone different does the round-up each week - a combination of a digest which is filtered by the reviewer's personal preferences...

I expect this to be nick'd - re-used & industrialized by some of the bigger testing forums soon :-)

I'm going to start with forums...

Over on the Yahoo SW testing group there was a question this week: What does the back of a hall of fame tester baseball card look like?

This started out as a silly/playfull question but developed into a more serious and interesting topic considering how (and if) testers can be compared across the industry, how to do it and inherent problems in just comparing testers within one company.

The beginning of October saw the launch of the testing.stackexchange.com site for questions related to testing. I dip in there daily as the site is quite active and worth a look - whether you have a question or an opinion/answer.

Topics discussed this week have ranged from "ET dynamics", tester/dev ratios, cost of bug fixes, Agile/Agile-testers to good books for absolute beginners. Definitely worth a look.

Just over a week ago the STC announced the idea of an e-magazine, asking for contributions for article submission and help with the admin, here. They now have enough volunteers for the admin/help but submission of articles is still open - and it's open to everyone of whatever level of experience!

Questions discussed this week ranged from Test managers who have never tested to Testers as Developers. I recommend everyone to take a look and contribute.

It's been a bit quieter on Test Republic this week - I'm hoping for some reports/posts from the Next Generation SW Testing II conference soon!

For the Swedish testers out there a new forum has just celebrated its first month, TestZonen.se (only in Swedish).

Discussions, blogs and questions seem to follow patterns where software testing is concerned - sometimes it's the sheep/lemin mentality and sometimes the goldfish mentality -but never really boring!

Next time I'll dip into some of the blog posts I've found interesting - hopefully rotating between blogs and forums.

Have you noticed anything interesting on one of the forums recently?